Grape Juice Wine Making

184 days ago

Been having some free time on my hands, so I decided to make myself some wine. I used the Berri brand of grape juice. Yes, I know the wine probably won’t be those high quality fine wine but that is not what I am looking for. In fact, it is virtually impossible to make such wine even if you have a vineyard at your backyard unless you know what you are doing. And if you can make such fine wines, you would probably be making them commercially anyway. There is good money to be made from wines. Just look at how much wine costs these days. Even supermarket brands cost like S$20 per bottle. Yes, probably a quarter of it goes to the government, but it is still pretty expensive.

Anyway, I am not looking to make fine wine. Just a decent drinkable dessert wine, nothing too complex. Just drinkable and relatively cheap. In Singapore, you could have a one litre grape juice for about S$2. All you have to do is to add some sugar (probably a cup) to help increase the sugar content, ferment it for maybe up to 3 months and you should have a drinkable wine. The sugar is to increase the alcohol content to that of normal wines, which is impossible with grape juice. There is just too little sugar in grape juice. As I said just a decent drinkable wine is what I am looking for.  Oh I forgot, you need some yeast as well. This time I use just normal bread yeast, which I think would work. There are wine yeast available to make wines. The next time I will probably go for it.

I did not take the photo of the primary fermentation. This is the secondary fermentation aka it has been racked – that is why it is so clear. What is surprisingly is that the bread yeast did rather well – I had expected it to die off pretty fast but it didn’t. It managed to ferment pretty much all the sugar – this wine is pretty dry. And it did form a good compact lees at the bottom, again that was something surprisingly. I read that most bread yeast flocculation would be pretty bad but as you can see in the next photo, I got a pretty clear well after racking.

Surprisingly clear without much sedimentation kicked up after racking. I am pretty impressed. I know it does look a bit cloudy, but this is probably due to my poor photography skills. It is actually pretty clear. Perhaps I will use bread yeast more often. Anyway, the racking was done about 2 weeks and I didn’t have a proper taste of the wine. It was pretty dry and felt a bit dull. But then again, this was from a grape juice so I don’t expect like those complex wines from France or whatever. Anyway, I should let it age for maybe 3  more months before tasting it again. Aging often works wonders with wine. So I will update you guys soon.

By the way, I have a Welch’s Grape Juice wine in the works as well. Once the primary fermentation is done, I will give you guys yet another update. This time I used wine yeast (Red Star Montrachet). Hope it will not give out too much sulfur. And I will be using proper equipment like an airlock for my fermenter to make the wine. My current setup is like of ridiculous – a food-grade plastic container with the lid slightly ajar. Air will probably get in and oxide the wine soon enough. The airlock and the bung will be coming soon.

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